


you, me, (and the reality)

by bonjourmags



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: AU, Imaginary Friend, M/M, alternative universe, ok it's cute and angsty i hope yall are ready
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 17:26:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13171716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonjourmags/pseuds/bonjourmags
Summary: Mike Wheeler, like other kids, has an imaginary friend, or that is what he tells himself. He grows up and the quiet girl stays around : she may not be as imaginary as he thinks. She introduces him to someone else - a boy.All of that stays invisible to the eyes of the outside world.





	you, me, (and the reality)

Some kids have imaginary friends. Unlike what most people think, it's not because they're lonely, it's mostly thanks to their important creativity making up people. Mike Wheeler was one of these kids, who talked alone in his room or said to his mommy, "There's no plate for my friends!" when she had put down four plates, one for her husband, one for herself, and two for her daughter and her little boy - the only people present in the room.

 

Mike first thought they were demons. She was the one who came first to him, from the insides of his brain - he was scared of her because she suddenly showed herself when it was a dark night, and she whispered in his ear. "Are you real?" She asked to him, while he was wondering the same. "Yes, I'm real. Are you evil?" He said to her, innocence and purity in his words, while her eyes were slightly glowing in the dark, with joy. "No, I'm just a little girl. I'm happy that I found you and that you're real." Her enormous smile was genuine and Mike, four years old, felt like she belonged with him. 

 

She was around him whenever she wanted so. It wasn't him who controlled her apparencies - he didn't mind, because he knew she was a real person and never thought she was imaginary. Maybe if someone told him that fake friends were a thing, he would maybe told her to go away and to play with someone else's mind, even if he liked her very much. 

 

He learned her name fairly quickly, it was Eleven. It was odd and he told that it was not a name but a number, and she said it could be both. He furrowed his brows, and decided that she would be named El, or Elf. It was way better than being Eleven, he thought, and she quickly followed his idea. They played together most of the time when it was after four, and she never showed her face before. Mike never asked why, but he knew that she had things to do before that. He had school, anyway, and couldn't give her time when he was in class. Also, he met other people - this boy, Dustin, that introduced him to someone else, Lucas. Mike liked them - maybe not as much as El because she was there since he could remember, but he liked them a lot.

 

They grew up together, hanging for a while. Sometimes she would appear while he's with his new friends, and she would stay quiet as she watches them having fun, and he hoped that the two boys could see her and that she could play at D&D with them, but she was present only in his eyes and mind. What a shame.

 

At some point, Dustin asked. Mike was ready to answer, because he knew it would happen. "Who are you talking to?" He said, weirded out but not that much because he was as weird. "I have an imaginary friend, and even if she's imaginary, she can't hear my thoughts. I can stop, if you want." He proposed, but when he said stop he couldn't really stop seeing her - she was the one working things around. She was the one who decided when she wanted to been seen, when she wanted to talk. All he could do is ignore her and not answer to her, or at least explaining why he couldn't be with her and with the others at the same time. Dustin shrugged. "It's fine!" 

 

He said it was fine but El was here when he asked and she seemed to bit hit by an airplane when he pronounced the words "imaginary friend", but her face wasn't showing it outside of her own inside garden, letting some flowers perish from the sentence. If only Mike knew, he would have found plant books and bought a thousand watering cans to revive every single damaged part of El's mind. He had no idea of how much more complex she was, that she was way more complicated than just being "Mike's imaginary friend", and that she had a life and problems to tell him about. But they were too young, at seven years old, and her problems were far from being explicable or understandable at this age.

 

They continued together for a long time. It was starting to be too long and Mike saw the lingering looks his mom gave him whenever he made a reference to El, assuring him that he was way too old to have an imaginary friend. He talked about her less and less, then learned morse code to talk to her when she was present while someone else was around. He told to whoever asked and wanted to hear that she was gone, a nice memory, but that she left one day and that he never saw her again. Of course, those were lies and El understood why he had to do that, but it didn't help the fire in the garden. She wanted to be a normal girl, and while she lived more normally through Mike's eyes, he wasn't her everything and she wasn't his. 

 

Mike knew that it was odd to keep an imaginary friend for so long. He was thirteen, and still wondering why El was always by his side, when the others couldn't see her. 

 

He looked up to see if he could have schizophrenia, but that wasn't it - against what was said in the books, El grew up with time, while it wasn't the case of other medical cases. "Mike." She told him once, trying to get his attention while he was doing his homework on searching his medical condition. "Mike. I need to tell you something but you have to promise me something." He looked up, made a head sign but didn't answer verbally because they were in a library. "You don't have to believe me on everything I will say, but at least trust me when I say I'm telling you the truth." He furrowed his brows, listening to her. 

 

"I'm not an imaginary friend. You're not schizophrenic either. Remember the first time we met, I asked you if you were real. Well, I was afraid you weren't because I'm sure I am." She said and her mind was a set of pencils who fell and she had to take all of them back in her small hands, from the smaller to the bigger, in a particular order. "I just happen to have... abilities. I don't know what they are, but I thought about a boy that looked like you, and then you were here. More like I was where you were, and it's crazy but, my papa makes me find people from all around the world all the time." It was hard to swallow, and Mike wasn't sure to follow.

 

"I'm real, Mike. I really exist, but my mind connected with you and I don't want to leave you because you're my best friend. But you're starting to think that I'm some weird phases of your brain, I'm not. Please trust me." She said, bitting her bottom lip with anxiety. "Dustin." he whispered, just before remembering that he was in a library, taking a piece of paper to write his words down. "If you can appear to everyone like you do with me, do it with Dustin. If he says that he saw you, I'll trust you - even more, I'll believe you." He packed his stuff and let the books he used on the table for one of the librarians.

 

He went out and as soon as the door was closed he was already handing his walkie talkie in his hands. "Dusty?" he asked, anticipation in his voice. He looked for El, but she wasn't anywhere to be seen - maybe she was at Dustin's. "Yeah, Mikey?" He heard a voice answering him through technology. He could feel his hands shake a bit, while his heart and his brain were trees rooting slowly together. "Look around. Is there a girl? Don't get scared if there is." He asked quietly, before he heard Dustin breath blocking. 

 

Suddenly, his heart and his brain were one. "Yeah, there is. Bald, wearing a medical attire. Dude, what the fuck is she doing here, and who is she?" he asked with nerves, humour, and mostly, a lot of fear. 

 

Mike explained everything to Lucas and Dustin. He said nothing to his mother or anyone that was family related and asked his friends to do the same. Unfortunately, El could only appear to one person at the same time, but she started to show up in Lucas and Dustin's head way more, leaving Mike alone. He didn't mind, mostly because Dustin truly enjoyed El's presence and Lucas was starting to acknowledge that she was nice. Slowly but surely, the group of three became four, even if the conversations weren't always easy between them. 

 

"There's a new boy in the lab." Said El to Mike, when they were talking about life in his bed. He was now sixteen, and the group as close as they could be. El told everything to them - her life in the lab, what she has to do for her papa, the people that were her brothers and sisters, the ones hurting her, the ones giving her food, the ones making examens on her. "I like him. He's very nice, and he drew me when I saw him. He never stops drawing. I want to be friends with him, he seems nicer than all of my other brothers and sisters, plus we have the same age." She added, approaching her hand towards Mike, before remembering that she couldn't touch him since she was some kind of illusion. "Why is he here? I thought all the people of the lab start their life in it. How come he joined you only at sixteen?" He asked.

 

"Maybe he was here since a while, I know papa hides stuff, even from me. But he's sick. That's why he's here, apparently, he's so sick that people don't want him around, so I guess papa can test whatever he wants on him. I'm worried, I think he won't be treated as kindly as I am here." She said and Mike shrugged. 

 

She would talk about him more and more, as if he was her new best friend. Mike couldn't help himself but being jealous of him, of the boy who caught El's eye. "His name is Will!" She told him once, then the other time, "He drew me again!" before adding, "he can heal people. Well, at least everyone, except himself." and even if he was jealous, he felt his heart in his throat when he heard her say, "Apparently he's dying from the inside." And no one ever talked about this information again, not even Dustin or Lucas, to whom El slurred words about Will all the time. 

 

Then El tried something - she appeared to Mike with a cloth around her eyes, holding something with her right hand that was invisible to her friend.

 

Until it wasn't invisible anymore, and Mike thought that was the best sight he'd ever seen in his life. 

 

El was holding a boy's hand. He was fairly small as Mike saw him, holding himself like he was unsure of everything, maybe even unsure if he was living. His eyes directly targeted Mike. "You must be Mike. Eleven told me a lot about you." He said and his voice wasn't crackling at all - his entire body was showing that he was fragile, even afraid, unable to feel anything, while his voice and eyes where showing his strong mind who could handle some more problems. "You must be Will, she said a lot about you too." 

 

Of course, it would have been a lie if he said that Will was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen, but something awoke Mike's guts when he saw him. Maybe his protective instincts - it didn't matter how sure Will was talking, how much his tone was showing that he was way more than Mike thought, he couldn't help but want to help this boy who looked sad. His body and his mind were two different things - and Mike was afraid by one, in love with the other. 

 

He said nothing, of course. Not to El, to Dustin, Lucas, and surely not his mother. He knew it wasn't normal to feel such things for a boy, and a voice was telling him deep inside that it's the same way he felt for El when they were younger - the same ache in his throat, the same eye looking after him, the same dry tongue that he know too much, the same ears wanting to hear her, but now his, voice once again. 

 

Will seemed to take an important part in the group. The four became a five, and they found a way to put him in their mimics. El found out that when she made him appear, she could leave right after, go to someone else's mind but Will would stay still in the first person's brain. Of course, it lasted an hour or so, before he would slowly fade away, smiling, "I guess I'm ghosting you again," he would say, and Mike wondered if he said to all of them or if he was his favorite and that was his special sentence. 

 

Will and Mike shared nights together. While El was staying by his side in the afternoon, the dark night was Will's and only his. They would lay down in his bed, not touching each other because it wasn't possible for them, but connecting in their ideas. At some point, Will told him everything about him - why he was being experienced on. Mike felt like they were close, maybe more than he had been with the other boys, but he wanted to ask more. 

 

"They call me Zombie boy because I'm dying from the inside," he started, softly, trying to express his thoughts without expressing his feelings. "A doctor, way before I was in the lab, made an error and gave me a decease. I started to have problems whenever. Then everything went downhill. People attacked me, my mom, my brother. They were saying that I should leave - parents signed a petition to make me leave school, so I did. Then a doctor heard about me and a few days after, I got a letter." 

 

A silence.

 

"I left my family because it was better for them. Either ways, I'm about to die. I don't want them to suffer because of my problems. It was better this way." He said, his voice clearly missing them, as much as he tried not to. "But I met El. And Dustin, and Lucas, and you." 

 

They don't talk much about his condition. They all know about it, and Mike think he knows that it is, he heard about it on the radio, that people are getting this and we don't know how to cure it - but it's insulting towards gays, saying that their nasty sex give them this problem so he turns the radio off before they say more.

 

As Mike grows, he became a poet. He thinks about Will and everything seems to be a metaphor of how he changed everything while he's not even able to move an object towards Mike. But he's now a poet when he thinks of him - but his poems are for his eyes only, his mind only, never to be showed to the world. He thinks he's probably crazy, because he has fell for a boy that isn't here, that a girl that isn't here presented him.

**Author's Note:**

> hi!! i know i start like shit tons of fics but i'll finish most of them don't worry!!  
> Please, tell me if you liked it, kudos and mostly comments make my whole day, and gives me the envy to write more!
> 
> here is my tumblr if you want to send prompts, talk, or send me headcanons! @sleepymikewheeler


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